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Cemetery Man: Movie Review

When I first saw CEMETERY MAN many a moon ago, I remember really loving it. I loved the straight faced humor, the absurdest charm of the characters, and the beautiful morbidity of the love story. Now, several years later when I revisited it, I wonder why it doesn’t hold the same appeal anymore. I pray I’m not maturing.

CEMEMTERY MAN follows Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) as he stoically tends to his job as the caretaker of a very special cemetery. You see, he and his assistant/pet Gnaghi (the perfectly cast François Hadji-Lazaro) have the unenviable task of not only burying the dead, but of also reburying them when they decide to crawl up from their graves. For some reason (is it the roots?) the dead just don’t stay dead and our heroes have to take extra precaution to return the ‘returners’ to their final resting spots.

Seems simple enough, but as the dead begin returning with more and more attitude still intact, it begins to take its toll on our heroes, not that you can really tell. Everett plays Dellamorte with such a stone face that you can barely tell he himself is alive until a beautiful widow (an even more perfectly cast Anna Falchi) shows up to put more than just a smile on his face.

It’s incredibly stylized zombie madness from Dario Argento protégé Soavi, the man who brought us THE CHURCH. CEMETERY MAN (aka DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE) was based on a comic book back before that was redundant to say about movies, and its episodic pacing shows that lineage. This is fun stuff, a little slow if you’re just out for an Italian gut muncher, but it’s easily the most visually stunning zombie flick set in a cemetery about an impotent man and his pet mute.
One of the reasons I loved it so much years ago was the concussive balance between beauty and monstrosity, the quiet and the loud. You have legitimately tender moments between characters one moment, and then truly eye opening blasts of hyper-violence. One second a couple is making love, the next we’re seeing heads ripped apart by gunfire, all the while trying to decipher the film’s surrealistic plot. It was as much fun talking about as it was watching. The recent talk of a sequel worries me, as anything following its revealing finale might do it damage, but after all these years, I would definitely like to revisit that cemetery, if for no other reason just to see is She is still lurking around the crypts.

There have been more horrific tales of the undead, and funnier zombie movies, too, but CEMETERY MAN is that rare film that works as both. Not a comedy and not a horror film, CEMETERY MAN is its own beast, unique and special. Not to be missed.